Weak. Pick up the phone now and call up a Green Power provider ’cause the government has bought into the electricity generation and ‘trade exposed’ industry blackmail about blackouts and ‘moving offshore.’ Lenore Taylor and the guy from Australian Science nailed it in questions: if they’re true blue about lobbying for a truly global agreement they should call these bluffs or follow the UK’s lead and start formalising some supply chain pollution controls. For the record, all of the $500m supposedly earmarked for renewables will be going to Coal and today’s signals are that the Rudd Government’s travesty of renewables policies continues fatuous.
Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Yesterday Dee Cee put in a passionate plea for ideas that are truly new and go beyond the industrial age as we know it, especially in relation to the business of mitigating climate change.
I don’t know how he rates the idea that US scientists have come up with of coating glass panels with a vegetable dye to make solar panels. Cheap solar panels that are more reliable and capable of generating up to ten times more electricity.
They are heading for commercialisation, it seems, but if you have the same idea here forget it unless you have a pile of cash.
Not since the Hanging Gardens of Babylon has there been an urban innovation…oh, hang on…
Not since the gardens of Versailles have we seen…oh, wait…
Not since ivy…
Ok, so it’s not really a new concept - but there is something enormously appealing and compelling about the vertical gardens designed by Patrick Blanc, which have transformed more than a few nondescript buildings and shopping malls across Europe.
Using a kind-of trellis system and felt impregnated with seeds, Blanc can design growing walls which live off grey water and nutrients drip-fed from the top of the structure. The system is lightweight and doesn’t damage the building, as it’s suspended a few inches out from the surface.
Continue reading ‘Could this turn cities into carbon sinks?’
From her cast iron balcony, Helen writes:
There’s a lot of rubbish written in the dead-tree media about blogging. On the one hand, there’s an obsession with comparing it with journalism (thus setting up a frame in which blogging can never seem worthwhile). Political blogging isn’t journalism. It’s not “breaking news”. Personal blogging isn’t simply a series of trivial comments about “what I had for breakfast”. Blogging is writing. That writing may tend more towards personal, literary, academic, political, parenting, food or craft, but it’s all writing. That is what we practice and we have a lot of fun on the way.
On a related note, Mark also recently suggested that the blogging/journalism conversation (or stoush) acts to obscure much of what is actually interesting about the practice of blogging (and presumably if a lot of bloggers actually wanted to be journalists, not being shrinking violets and being generally smart cookies, they’d have done that), particularly insofar as it avoids all sorts of conversations being dominated by “white blokes in suits”. So, as Helen suggests, if you want to read something sensible in the dead tree media about blogging, read this piece written by… a blogger. Elissa Baxter riffs off some research into blogging and happiness, and interviews a range of Oz bloggers, including Helen herself and our own Suze, about why they blog and what they get out of it.
Elsewhere: More from Lauredhel at Hoyden and Suze at Personal Political.
When I read about Andrew Leigh’s departure from academia into the pointy end of the social policy world on secondment to Treasury for six months, my first thought was that it was a mixed blessing - no doubt Andrew will do good things in the public service, but taking him out of the mix of commentary in the blogosphere and the pages of the Fin deprives us of one of the far too few provocative and interesting and informed writers on public affairs we have in this country. My second thought, having attended Richard Allan’s presentation at the CCi conference last week was that it didn’t need to be this way. Tim Watts got there before me - pointing to the much more enlightened view taken on public servants contributing to public debate in the Old Blighty. Once the home of the “Official Secrets Act” and all things backstage and hidden, Westminster is doing an awful lot better in promoting open government and facilitating public debate than we are in this country. And British citizens are doing a lot better at finding ways to talk back to power via the web. Worth thinking about why that might be so.
So sang Madonna.
If we took a holiday
Took some time to celebrate
Just one day out of life
It would be, it would be so nice
It’s school holiday time (which doesn’t - obviously - mean parent holiday time!)… I’m due to submit the first draft of my PhD thesis on Friday some time (possibly late-ish). The marking’s all done. The conference is over. But that wonderful thing called semester starts up again on the 21st. And I don’t have either the time or the money to take my preferred break - which was going to be an intertubes-less week in a cabin by a beach somewhere reading books, followed by a week of partay-ing in Sydney or Melbourne, followed by a week back in Brisneyland under the doonah. So give me some vicarious holiday goodness! Do we get enough holidays? What do we do when we take them? Are we ever away in a wired world?
I’ve been reading Jerry F. Hough’s Changing Party Coalitions: The Mystery of the Red State-Blue State Alignment on and off over the weekend, after it arrived from Amazon on Friday. I’d been wanting to have a read for a while - after I saw this review. Part of what Hough - a long time Sovietologist and comparative politics scholar - is trying to do is to expose some of the myths that we tend to create about past political patterns and partisan alignments - based on our present understanding of voter motivation and party image. He makes the point - not in itself an unusual one but rarely developed to its full analytical potential - that the Democrats and Republicans have effectively swapped ideological sides several times, though his analysis of the Jacksonian-Jeffersonian mythos of the Democratic Party suggests that the Donkeys were never actually to the left of the GOP before FDR. It’s also highly relevant to note that Adlai Stevenson was the first “New Democrat” - adopting a “suburban strategy” that effectively turned its back on the New Deal’s economic agenda, and that JFK, although his ideas on foreign policy were quite distinct from Adlai’s, shared his economic conservatism and was effectively a do-nothing President in the domestic policy field. The fact that “left” and “right” or “liberal” and conservative” have shifted ground from the New Deal party system to a cultural focus, and that McGovernite cultural liberalism was a big part of that shift, obscures for instance the truth that Richard Nixon was arguably a moderate liberal domestically, while McGovern’s economics had more in common with Goldwater than Johnson.
Hough’s also fascinating on the contingency of racial and national identity, and although some of his own commitments are shaped by a relatively conservative developmentalist political science ideology of modernisation, his injection of a long historical perspective and a sociological toolkit into political analysis of the American scene is a very valuable contribution. Changing Party Coalitions was written in 2005, but his discussion of the dynamics of the recent “Red State-Blue State Alignment” is quite prescient - and very useful for thinking about what Barack Obama’s biggest political challenge might be, and why Hillary Clinton was able to do well as a very unlikely standard bearer of the white working class.
Continue reading ‘Beyond the red state-blue state dichotomy’
I spent the latter part of last week attending the Creating Value: Between Commons and Commerce conference organised by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. The CCi conference was here in Brisbane - at the Convention Centre over at Southbank - but it was evidently a bumper week for conferences and fora related to blogging - with Canberra hosting a Microsoft Politics & Technology Forum and PDF2008 (”Personal Democracy Forum”) taking place in New York.
I’ll be writing something up later in the week on what I gleaned from the CCi conference, but in the meantime, for anyone interested in the interfaces between citizen journalism, blogging, new media and online technologies and platforms, there is, of course, a lot of reading material available on the web. The Microsoft thing seems the least blogged - and perhaps that’s because rather oddly, political bloggers were largely left off the invite list - though I did hear that Annabel Crabb launched a memorable attack on us in absentia. Unfortunately there were no “sketch writers” present to record it. But Axel Bruns at Snurb has posted a comprehensive coverage of many of the key sessions of CCi, and Terry Flew and Jason Wilson also provide some information and commentary. Over in the Big Apple, Tim Watts from Tree of Knowledge has done a sterling job reflecting on some of the sessions he attended at PDF2008.
Jason Wilson picks up on the Burchell attack piece on bloggers I wrote about earlier today, and asks some pertinent questions. He also points to comments at Public Opinion:
He’s just trolling on an op-ed page.
Posted by: dj | June 23, 2008 10:33 AM
“He’s just trolling on an op-ed page.”
True. Baiting bloggers is the new tactic for attention seekers.
Posted by: Lyn | June 23, 2008 10:45 AM
Coincidentally, there’s a new post by danah boyd at apophenia about the diffusion of troll-like behaviour outside the intertubes:
Continue reading ‘Trolling, not just for the intertubes any more’
Sometime around 2018 all our news will be based on the idea of probability, offered up by a giant near sentient super computer able to calculate billions of computations per second. With the full contents of the worlds history in it’s archives and having all current human activity (including mums e-mail of that curry recipe to aunt Kylie) fed into it daily, it will project the daily news based on precise self created mathematical algorithms.
Digg like betting markets will be created around these projections and billions will be won or lost by a new kind of master of the universe, the alcopops fuelled sixteen year old news junkie. Rupert the super computer will be fed daily with an engineered paste created from the remains of all living editors, sub editors, columnists, journalists and bloggers. Unfortunately this masterful human creation will go completely bonkers when accidentally fed a tube of Bolt. All news will end, and as we know, no news is good news so the world will celebrate it’s new found freedom from media tyranny.
Nuclear energy is off the public agenda in Australia for now, and likely won’t reappear for a little while at least. But there are reasons to think it might come back at some time in the medium-term future. The key question as to whether we see it appear back on the public agenda is the shape of the emissions trading scheme. How steep will the cuts required be - or, alternatively, how high will the carbon price go? At $20 per tonne, nuclear probably doesn’t look all that attractive. At $50 per tonne, it starts to look much more interesting. A second question is whether the new low-emission technologies - my picks are solar thermal and geothermal, because they’re potentially reasonably cheap and supply power when it’s needed - actually start to work out in practice. The third area of uncertainty is the progress of carbon capture and storage technology. As many LP commenters have noted, progress has been far slower than its numerous proponents have expected. The final question is that of natural gas prices. Natural gas is going to be exported from the Australian east coast, so any new gas-fired electrical generation will have to pay the world market price for the stuff; and that’s pretty damn dear. At current US natural gas prices, the fuel to run a gas-fired generator will cost roughly $85 per megawatt-hour of electricity generated. If you have a look at the NEMMCO Australian electricity market data, that’s roughly double the average wholesale price of electricity in most Australian states. If natural gas stays at these prices, it’s no longer going to be a low-cost replacement for coal, and that makes nuclear look pretty appealing.
But, in any case, whether nuclear power will happen in Australia is a question that can wait for another day. Today, a round-up of some things that are happening around the world with nuclear.
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
As for me, I’m over-writing “Lazy Sunday” as it’s anything but for me. I expect to be up to the early am hours tomorrow getting the first draft of my thesis into a shape I’m happy to submit to my supervisor. So while everyone else is more than welcome to post on their weekend doings, I thought I’d share some photographic insights for the benefit of any other research students out there - Mark’s tips on how to finish a PhD dissertation!
#1: Use the tried and true yellow post-it note method for the citations and references you need.
#2: The dietetics of thesis completion are as important as the dialectics. Stock up on a nutritionally varied range of stimulants.
#3: While prayer and/or meditation may be important aids to writing, ensure that candles are not lit next to piles of books but remain symbols only.
Continue reading ‘Lazy Sunday! How to finish a phd thesis draft’
Much and all as their antediluvian internet access policy is annoying, if you want to be kept informed about important issues you pretty much have to read the Fin. Today, for instance, there was a report (brief summary here) indicating the difficulties the states and the federal government were having in implementing e-health. Apparently, plans to introduce universal electronic medical records - that is, storing your entire medical history in a centralized electronic database - have been delayed until 2012. 2012? 2009? I wasn’t even aware that a formal plan to introduce such a thing exists, let alone by 2009.
As previously noted here, there are very serious privacy and security concerns about such systems, as well as great potential advantages. If they get it wrong, there’s considerable potential for it to blow up in the government’s face.
So here’s my little question. Before we get to the stage of spending billions - rather than the $150-million odd already spent around the country on such projects - it would be nice if the privacy and security issues were thrashed out. At the very least, it might save a lot of money in redesigns after media pressure forces hasty changes. Are we going to have a public discussion of these issues, or are we going to get another departmental omnibus program that, like the Access Card, is going to be so flawed that the only thing to do once it’s announced to fight is kill it off? Maybe a discussion paper or two to kick things off the discussion, perhaps?
We’re a bit late to this party, for a number of reasons (no doubt including modesty, but more of that later). Trevor Cook reported last month on some research conducted by Dr Colin McLeod and presented to the MEAA’s Public Affairs Convention. The answer, according to McLeod, is yes. Over at gatewatching, Jason Wilson linked to Cook’s post with this commentary:
I seem to recall that last year that we copped a bit of stick for suggesting that Larvatus Prodeo was an influential blog. This was, of course, partly premised on Axel’s issuecrawler analysis of issue networks in the Australian blogosphere. The value of this analysis was disputed at the time, by other influential bloggers.
We’re certainly not universally popular in the blogosphere as this post indicates. But to forestall the anticipated flood of loud condemnations, it’s worth pausing to examine the nature of the claim being made in McLeod’s and Axel Bruns’ research, and what sort of “influence” they’re measuring, which I’ll do over the fold. I imagine that won’t actually forefend the loud condemnations, because there are a few folks out there who are obsessed with their big swinging hits. No names, no packdrill. They can out themselves by linking here.
I’ll also take the chance to update folks on our advertising performance and site stats for May, which was something of a bumper month for both.
Continue reading ‘Is Larvatus Prodeo Australia’s most influential political blog?’
There’s an interesting piece by Dana Goldstein in The New Republic on the fractures in the American “A-List” Democratic blogosphere around the primaries. I very rarely read Kos or MyDD, and this seems to me to express why:
The Netroots has always had a hostile streak, and it’s natural that as the Democratic Party and the Netroots themselves began to wield more power, some of that hostility would be directed inwards. Its denizens are also a relatively homogeneous bunch–largely male, middle-aged, college-educated, and upper middle class. The Democratic Party is a diverse coalition reliant on African Americans, single women, union members, and Latinos. Compound that demographic gap with the impersonality and frequent anonymity of the online world, and it seems inevitable that feelings would be hurt, and that some progressives would feel unwelcome in the clubhouse.
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